The Miami Times

I've Been Thinking

BY CAB CALLOWAY

There is something very fascinating about the excerpts from book reviews which the publisher proudly prints on the jackets of a new book. I never start to read a book until I check the jacket to see whether the New York Times has given me a clear go-ahead.

Lately, however, I have been making a review survey and I have come up with a puzzling bit of unpublicized Americana regarding the reading public's habits.

The Times man invariably says, in so many words, that the book is good, mediocre, or bad. So does the fellow from the Herald Tribune, and so do all the New York reviewers. They don't tell you how to read the book and they don't tell you that you will laugh yourself to tears. They just think up a clever way of saying the book is okay and then they let it go at that.

However, whenever a book reviewer from Hartford, Cleveland, Oshkosh or Walla Walla reviews a book he seems to have an insatiable desire to tell you how to read the book.

"Fill the tub with nice cool water. Fix a lemonade, and then take this book to the bath with you. It's a scorcher and you'll want to be cool while you read it," will be his boyish advice.

"One may read it in the bus," the Hartford Times suggests of one tome, "Better yet, take it to bed as we did and cry yourself to sleep with tears of pure joy."

How one can tell a bus-reading book from a bathtub book is beyond me, but the critics know! And it is bad practice to tell me that I will cry myself to sleep with pure joy, because all that does to me is to make me harden myself. I am obstinate at heart and I become dead determined not to even giggle at a book after this cocksure kind of a review.

Now, I have noticed one thing too. Never yet has a New York critic thought there are better pastimes. Maybe New York critics think there are better things to do in bed . . . like sleeping, for instance. But they seem to steer wide of that suggestion.

But not the out of town critic. He is forever suggesting that I get between the covers and enjoy this book to the fullest.

I have tried it and I say, let the critics read in bed if they want to. I'll take mine in an easy chair under a good strong reading lamp. In bed you start off lying down with the head slightly propped.

After fifteen minutes your neck muscles stiffen and your eyes glaze over, so you pound your pillow into a backrest and sit up.

There is nothing more uncomfortable than sitting up in bed. You slip down, your back begins to twitch, and flop over onto your side. In this position, slow paralysis sets into the arm and posterior and if you are like me, you give the whole thing up and get out like a sensible book reader. If I must read it in bed I'll not read the darned book, m'lad.